Mobile wireless telecommunications services are typically provided to customers via a prepaid account or a postpaid account. Postpaid accounts are designed so that the postpaid customer is billed at the end of a billing cycle for services rendered in excess of a service plan. Often times, the customer is unaware of the overage and is billed an unexpected amount at the end of the billing cycle.
Services such as AT&T's Rollover® service aim to eliminate overages by accumulating unused minutes at the end of each billing cycle for use in future billing cycles. For example, if a customer uses 900 minutes of a 1000 minute service plan during a billing cycle, the remaining 100 unused minutes are added to the customer's total available Rollover® minutes. If the customer exceeds the 1000 minute limit during a future billing cycle, the customer's Rollover® account is debited the overage amount of minutes instead of the customer being charged overage fees for the excess minutes. Minutes in a customer's Rollover® account are typically set to expire after a predetermined time, such as every year.
Prepaid customers typically purchase a credit for a predetermined number of voice minutes or data blocks (often offered in increments of megabytes or gigabytes) prior to receiving voice or data service. By purchasing credit in advance of use on a mobile wireless network, a customer can access voice or data services without contractual obligation and a re-occurring bill, as is the case with many postpaid service plans. A customer may then use the voice or data service until the expiration of the prepaid credit.
While features such as Rollover® provide incentive for potential customers to select one mobile wireless service provider over another, the transition of the mobile wireless service industry from providing voice and data services to providing predominately data-based services, including Voice over Internet Protocol (“VoIP”) via Long-Term Evolution (“LTE”) for example, will eventually render the concept of voice minutes obsolete in favor of data-centric service plans. Moreover, the integration in many mobile devices of operating system level and application level features that rely upon a data connection contributes to the need for greater data usage by customers. Many of these features are provided via a cloud computing model, by which software and other computing resources are stored, managed, and/or processed on remote computers that are often collectively referred to as “the cloud.” As a result of the mobile wireless service industry's transition to predominately data-based services, and the simultaneous and contributory transition of the computing industry to the cloud computing model, mobile wireless service providers may desire to investigate ways to reduce costs while maintaining quality of service and customer costs in this new data-centric landscape.